


Demigod Hero, Fairytale Prince

by Always1



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: BAMF Percy Jackson, Camp Half-Blood (Percy Jackson), Canon-Typical Violence, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Percy goes to another camp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28844379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Always1/pseuds/Always1
Summary: Normal lives are almost impossible for half-blood children, but jumping down an open manhole to wrestle a fire-breathing sewer gator?That could only happen to Percy Jackson.In which the gods aren’t the only forces to be forgotten by mortals, and one good deed can mark you for life.Welcome to Camp Scheherazade.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 40





	1. In Which I’m No Brothers Grimm

Look, this _probably_ wasn’t your fault. 

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re new to the camp, and because you weren’t supposed to be involved in all of this fairytale insanity to begin with.

I sure wasn’t, and my getting involved made some very powerful people kind of angry.

Long story. We’ll get there later on.

I know you’re scared, and I know part of you wants to put this book down and walk away; you want to go back home and pretend the events that led you here never happened, that it was all a crazy dream. Too much pizza before bedtime or your brain having fun with that Disney movie you watched a couple days ago.

**DON’T.**

You may be scared, but you aren’t alone. More importantly, the fact that you were given this book in the first place means your chance of normalcy is officially out the window.

Sorry.

_They_ know you now, and they won’t ever forget a scent.

Especially if you made them mad.

And that’s not hard.

Who am I to tell you you’re in too deep?

My name is Percy Jackson.

Though most people know me as the Hero (yes, that was meant to be capitalized) Percy Jackson.

Or Prince Perseus, but that’s awful, so let’s just stick with Percy.

You may have been called a Hero since getting to camp, or one of the Cursed or Blessed. You may have a different title or cabin entirely, but you’re probably one of these three if you ended up needing the intro readings, because we’re the three groups that tend to start out as semi-regular people with semi-regular lives, right until we mess up and get marked by someone or something that wasn’t supposed to be real.

Anyway, more about me.

I wasn’t always the head of the Hero cabin, and I used to think all that “once upon a time” stuff was just some stories people thought up to entertain themselves before television was an option.

Right up until I watched a mutant sewer gator drag a man down through an open manhole.

In retrospect, jumping down after them should have been Plan B, with Plan A being almost anything else.

This is how I became an accidental Hero.

And later a demigod.

(It’s complicated.)

It all started a couple months after we moved in with my jerk of a stepfather, Smelly Gabe Ugliano...


	2. I Embrace My Inner Ninja Turtle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Hero’s journey begins

My mom has been through a lot in her life.

She lost her parents as a kid, and her uncle took her in, but I don’t think he was ever that nice to her. Still, Sally Jackson did her best and worked hard to pay her way through school, only to have to drop out halfway into her last term to help take care of said uncle, and she ended up with nothing.

No family.

No diploma.

No money to her name or connections she could use.

The one good thing was that there was nothing thing holding her back from meeting my dad.

If you can call that good, considering how it ended with her alone _again_ , and this time with another mouth to feed.

But Mom was smart, and we got by.

I was almost nine when Mom had her first date with Smelly Gabe, who was just Gabe to me back then, even though the stink levels were about the same.

He seemed alright then. Not who I’d picture with my wonderful mom, but decent enough. They dated half a year before he popped the question, and she said yes.

The jerk showed his true colors as soon as they married and we moved in, which is when I stopped feeling bad about calling him smelly in my head.

“Hey, Sally! Get me a beer!”

Opening my eyes, I sat up in bed. Distantly, I could hear my mom shuffling down the hall, probably with Smelly Gabe’s beer.

As if _that_ was something he needed more of.

Getting up, I nearly brained myself on my dresser when I tripped over a sweatshirt I’d forgotten to put in the hamper before I’d gone to sleep. I looked into the small, kind of dusty mirror hung above the dresser and saw a tired pair of blue-green eyes looking back at me.

It was clearly going to be _one of those days_.

Still, better to get out before Mom left for work, which would be...in ten minutes.

I hurried to get ready and was sliding into the kitchen with two minutes to spare.

“Good morning, Percy. Did you sleep well?”

My Mom is the sort of person who asks things like that because she genuinely wants to know. It’s nice, but there’s always a little pressure to have a positive answer.

Mom needed to hear something good after what we’d had to deal with lately.

“Yeah, it was great. You heading out?”

“Uh huh,” grabbing her blue apron off a hood, she fastened it around her waist. “I should be home by six. Do you need anything while I’m out?”

“No, I’m fine.”

I grabbed my shoes, shoving them onto my feet without bothering to undo the laces.

Mom cleared her throat and I looked up.

_Please don’t ask._

“Are _you_ going somewhere?”

I really wished she hadn’t asked.

As a New Yorker, born and raised, I was pretty used to having a little independence, especially with a parent who has a full time job, but that doesn’t mean I was allowed to just go off on my own whenever I wanted to.

I didn’t even have plans, but I wanted to be out as much as I could while Mom was working. It was easier to not be around by the time the greasy loser in the living room got into his third beer.

Which I absolutely couldn’t tell her, so...

“Um, I’m hanging out with a couple of the guys from school.” As if. “Sam and Rashid, remember? We’re going to the park and getting ice cream.”

I did actually have class with a Sam and Rashid, but we sure weren’t getting ice cream together anytime soon.

Instantly, the worry melted off her face, and she smiled down at me.

“Oh, I’m glad you’re spending time with your friends. Have a great day! Tell them hello from me!”

“Sure. Bye, Mom.”

“Bye!”

With that, we were out of the apartment and off in separate directions.

I felt a little bad about lying, but a harmless story never hurt anyone.

Besides, I loved walking around New York.

It’s smelly, dirty, no one respects personal space, and anyone who wants to talk is either a lost tourist or looking for money.

The city is, in my humble opinion, one of the best places on earth.

Maybe after Montauk, but still pretty awesome.

Without much of a plan in mind, I set off. I did have enough to cover lunch and maybe some snacks, so there were a few good markets I could go by, and then maybe eat in the park.

Possibly by the lake if it wasn’t too busy.

Despite how garbage life had been lately, with the marriage and the move and everything, I was finally feeling optimistic.

Which should have been my first clue.

The actual first clue was when the streets began to empty out a little as I went further south.

It wasn’t _empty_ , but there were less people than there should have been, considering what a nice day it was.

The next clue was the steam coming out of the grates.

Now, that wasn’t that unusual.

New York has a pretty extensive sewer system, and sometimes the ventilation gets a bit obvious and a bit...fragrant.

But there was a lot of steam, and it smelled bad.

Like, Smelly Gabe on a high onion and anchovy diet bad.

A pipe must’ve burst, which explained the lack of crowding on the sidewalks, but I didn’t see any construction or sanitation workers.

Yanking the front of my shirt up and over my nose, I soldiered on.

The third clue was the most obvious, in that it was well and truly impossible.

As I walked, I heard yelling and rattling. Not unusual at all in the city, but it sounded like it was coming from an alley.

I wasn’t in a particularly crime-ridden part of the borough, but noises from an alley were never a good sign.

It was never ‘Hey, we’re the Prize Patrol! Come over here to receive your giant check!’ 

More like ‘Hey, slip me a fiver and you can keep walking.’

Admittedly, this was the point where I should have turned around, or AT LEAST crossed the street in order to maintain some distance.

But something stopped me.

The voice I was hearing...it didn’t sound angry. It sounded scared.

And that rattling was really bad, almost a growling roar at times.

There was so much steam on the street, and with that noise and a guy who sounded like he was panicking...

He could be in danger.

I should’ve looked for someone with a phone or run into the nearest store for help, but that didn’t occur to me until after.

I was less than twenty feet from the alley and I saw a flickering orange light coming out.

Fire. 

A guy was in there and he could be burning as I stood and watched.

I was running before I knew what I was doing, turning into the alley with one arm flung across my head as though that would protect me from burns.

My eyes widened.

As you may have guessed from the...well, _everything_ about this book, I don’t read much.

But I do watch a lot of movies.

And a lot of those movies have scenes where the main character has this big, life defining moment that yanks them out of their normal lives and into a crazy adventure.

My crazy, life defining moment was watching what looked like a huge, badly deformed alligator with freaking _wings_ latch onto a man with vicious looking claws (do gators have claws? because this one had claws large and dexterous enough to encircle a human leg without any trouble) and drag him kicking and screaming down an open manhole.

I stood, probably staring like an idiot, wondering what sort of chemicals had to be mixed in with the grate steam for me to see _that_.

It wasn’t possible.

The hole wasn’t even large enough for the gator hallucination to have gone down if it had been real, and certainly not large enough for the monster gator to go down with a kicking, screaming person.

It wasn’t real.

It couldn’t be.

I didn’t even hear the screaming anymore, so my temporary, smog-induced insanity must’ve ended.

The hole was just...there.

And the screaming had stopped.

It was good that the screaming stopped - it meant the auditory part of the hallucination had resolved itself.

And yet.

The screaming had _stopped_.

The winged sewer gator wasn’t real, but maybe the guy was, and if that was the case, and he’d fallen down there, alone and while the weird chemical steam was coming up...

“This is a really bad idea.”

With the ease of someone who’d grown up on TMNT (movies, cartoons, AND the comics) I crouched down, eyes finding a narrow, rusted ladder leading into the near blackness of the sewers.

“Hello?”

No one answered, but I thought I could hear something moving down there, not too close, but maybe he’d rolled when he landed.

Taking one last breath, I started climbing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think so far!


	3. I Take a Wrong Turn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy’s rescue mission doesn’t go the way he’d planned

Climbing into a sewer is less glamorous than you might think.

For starters, no matter how bad it smelled up above, that was nothing compared to the pure, unadulterated _stink_ wafting up from the bottom.

Another thing you might not expect is the heat.

A sewer’s basically a cave, and caves should be cold.

I remember going on this field trip upstate a year ago, to some big cavern system with streams and stalactites - the works.

Even in the summer, it was _freezing_ down there, and that was BEFORE I tripped and nearly took an unexpected river ride.

Mrs. Marchesi hadn’t looked impressed after fishing me out of the water, but she had been nice enough to lend me her sweater, itchy and ugly as it was, and I wasn’t even sent back to the bus to ‘think about the consequences of my actions’.

Pity I’d gotten kicked out of that school a month later. It hadn’t been a bad one.

But, going back to the cave thing.

Caves should be cold, and sewers were man-made cave systems, so sewers should be cold.

Sewers are not cold.

About a minute down and my shirt was plastered to my back, sweat was dripping down my neck, and I was seriously regretting not staying home for some bonding time with Smelly Gabe.

It was _that_ bad.

The third thing I noticed was that I really should have reached the end of the latter after a couple minutes of climbing. 

I looked down. Completely black.

I looked up. I tiny pinprick of light from the surface. I couldn’t even see any of the bars from the grates that should be littering the street above - the grates I’d walked over and around before getting to the alley.

_That’s weird._

Looking back, there were definitely a few warning signs I wasn’t picking up on, but you need to consider it from my perspective; I really thought there was something in the steam messing with my head, so anything strange just felt like the side effect of something I’d already accepted.

Why was I climbing down into the source of the chemical-laden, probably toxic steam when I already thought the guy I’d seen was a hallucination?

...Because I was nine? I don’t know. It made sense at the time. Also, I would have felt terrible if I saw on the news that they actually had found a man down there.

So I kept climbing.

The side rails were pretty rusted, so I kept my hands on the rungs as much as I could. They were better, but a little slimy.

To keep myself occupied, I started counting how many rungs I’d gone down.

Ten from that point.

Twenty.

Fifty.

Eighty.

A hundred.

One fifty.

One hundred fifty sev-

_Skwee!_

“Gah!” My foot slipped back as it hit the ground, nearly sending me face first into the unforgiving metal of the ladder.

I’d reached the bottom.

Finally.

How long had I even been climbing? I looked at my watch, but couldn’t see the numbers in the near darkness. It was somehow lighter than it had been when I was on the ladder, but trying to focus my eyes on the small surface was giving me a headache.

I looked around.

From what I could see, there was a thin walkway, maybe eighteen inches or so, that would let the city employees keep out of the water while they worked.

If he’d rolled...

I checked the water, getting as close as I could without toppling over, but I didn’t see anything moving or any body-shaped lumps.

There was nothing here.

I’d climbed down what felt like a thousand feet into a literal sewer for nothing.

It was almost funny.

A plastic take out bag floated past, a big yellow smiley face thanking me for my purchase.

Scratch that - it _was_ funny, and I couldn’t help the laugh that followed, or the one after that.

_I’m going to need a shower before I go home. I wonder if the gym on fifteenth will let me in if I say I’m meeting my parents there?_

Shaking my head at how stupid my impromptu rescue mission had been in retrospect, I turned back to the ladder, lifting myself onto the first rung and reaching up-

Red and orange light.

My head shot to the right, the speed and force hurting my neck a little, but I didn’t notice.

I’d seen that light before.

Fire.

Like what I had seen above, with the nightmare gator and the screaming man.

I looked up, at the small, barely visible light from the surface.

I got off the ladder.

_Just follow the light for a minute. It’s a straight path. If it’s another vision, then I’ll just turn back._

I started walking, slowly and carefully. The stone beneath my feet was slick with water and something slimy I hoped was mold.

The growling noise was back, low, but deep enough to vibrate through my chest, like the bass at the one and only wedding celebration I’d been invited to.

I kept moving, wishing I had a flashlight.

The tunnel got hotter and steamier the further I went, and the smell went from awful to indescribably rank.

Burning my clothes was the only option after a trip like that. The trash was too good for the level of nasty I felt like all over.

My foot hit something again, and there was the harsh clink of metal.

Were those...chains?

They were, and they looked old. Not even like the ones in hardware stores or the rubber coated links I sometimes saw.

These looked thick and rough, darker than any chain I’d ever seen in person. They reminded me of that knight movie I’d watched once - where the hero was sent to the dungeon to wait for execution.

Something thin and off-white caught my eye, but I looked away.

There was no way that was...no, that wasn’t bone. It was just the steam messing with my head, or maybe it _was_ part of a skeleton but, like, the plastic ones from Halloween. Someone may have left it here as a prank. There were a couple schools in the area - it was probably a hazing thing. Send someone down into a homemade haunted house and watch them freak out.

Not that I was freaking out.

(I was.)

Stepping over another mess of torn metal pieces and Halloween leftovers, I heard the growl again, louder and angry.

And a moan. A very human sounding moan.

“Hello? Hello?!”

A shuffling up ahead. The sound of something moving, sliding against stone.

“Hello? Um, sir? Are you there?”

I heard the voice again. It was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it over the growl of whatever machine was misfiring down there.

“I’m on my way!”

Picking up the pace as much as I could without slipping, I reached the source of the noises, a narrow opening in the side of the wall.

Ducking through, I found myself in one of those big rooms. What are they called? Alcoves? Enclosures? 

Chamber. It was a chamber, and it was big. Too big to be here, and there was no way the sanitation crews would put lit torches along the walls.

Wherever I was, it didn’t feel like New York anymore.

The man from before was there, and the fire I’d seen wasn’t from any machine, broken or not.

Huge, scaled jaws opened wide, and a monstrous roar froze me in my tracks.

“Kid, run! Get out of here!”

Mottled green and brown scales, glistening with muck and garbage.

Small, beady yellow eyes that somehow captured my entire body in their reflection.

“Move! I can’t hold it! Go already!”

Teeth larger than my palm, serrated and jutting out of that gigantic mouth at all angles.

Thin, shredded wings flared.

Clawed feet scratched across the floor as the creature advanced.

“RUN!”

I’m not proud, but I took the man’s advice, spinning around and - nothing.

The entrance back into the sewer was gone. 

I was trapped with the man and

and

The actual

Real life

Mutant, trash heap covered, fire-breathing _dragon_.

Suffice to say, I didn’t make it home in time for dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m trying to write this in the standard Percy Jackson style, so let me know what you think.
> 
> I know Percy fought the Minotaur as a kid with zero training and pretty much no idea what he was doing, but that was because he’d just seen Sally “die” and was trying to protect Grover. I feel like a younger version of himself who was told to run by a stranger would probably seriously consider doing so when the alternative is SEWER DRAGON.


	4. I Punch a Sewer Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy battles his first monster

Let’s review how things got to this point.

I was nine (nearly ten) years old.

I started out my morning planning a picnic at the park.

I’d followed the sound of someone in trouble and watched a man being dragged down into the sewers by Killer Croc’s uglier, _stinkier_ cousin.

And now I was somewhere that was _very much_ not the sewer I had followed them into, being stared down by a huge, angry looking mythical reptile.

Only in New York, am I right?

The trash dragon watched me, thin trails of smoke leaking from its nostrils. Something that may have been a liquid, a solid, or some disgusting combination of the two trailed down the side of its mouth.

The man was still yelling, but I couldn’t hear him over the pounding of my heart.

Now, I want to say that this was when I dug deep and discovered some hidden hero’s spirit that let me face the danger with quick strikes and a carefree laugh, but that’s not what happened.

I froze.

One clawed foreleg edged forward, and then another as the beast began to move.

I didn’t move an inch.

The steam - the creature’s breath, I realized - was fogging up my head, barely letting me process anything other than my own all consuming _terror_.

The dragon picked up speed, legs throwing up droplets of water as they slammed into puddle after puddle.

Maybe it was the sight of the water shining in the light of the torches that finally let me break away from the trash dragon’s eyes, or maybe my self-preservation finally kicked in, but I was suddenly able to move, and I made the most of it by running faster than I’d ever run in my life.

And right in time.

The dragon barreled past, a streak of fire and fangs, nearly hitting the chamber wall before turning my way, but I kept moving.

I ran, making sure to zig and zag as much as I could. Vaguely, I wondered if this was what it was like to run from a regular alligator or crocodile.

What would Steve do?

**GGRRRRRRROOOOOOOAAAAAAAA!**

Steve would keep running.

But I was nine years old and small for my age, while the dragon had to be at least twenty feet long and with some deeply unfair stampede genetic mixed in there somewhere, because it was gaining on me.

Fifteen feet.

Ten feet.

Five feet.

I could feet steam _burn_ through the back of my shirt as it’s jaws opened wide.

 _Thud!_

“Hey, ugly! Forget something?”

**Grrrhisss!**

It was the guy, the one who’d tried to tell me to run before the wall sealed up.

Slowing my run as I made it to the opposite side of the circular room, I turned and got my first good look at the man I’d been trying to rescue - the man who’d just saved my life from death by hungry sewer dragon.

_Woah._

From the shoulders up, he looked like a regular guy. Dark brown hair, a little wavy looking, pulled back into a short ponytail. Kind of patchy facial hair. Eyes I couldn’t quite make out at that distance, but were clearly either blue or green. Tan skin.

Good looking in kind of an unkempt way, but not really anything that would make you take notice if you passed by him on the street.

From the shoulders _down_ , however...

Well, that was a different story.

The dragon roared, a rush of fire bursting from its mouth and the man sprang back, dark boots almost dancing against the stones.

The boots, the kind you might see on a hiker, were probably the most normal thing about his outfit.

The pants were black, covered in pockets that seemed to all be bulging with whatever they contained.

The jacket was a dark blue; not navy, but a really deep sapphire. I thought it was leather up until it caught the light _just right_ and I saw a hint of scale. And he definitely had a vest on under that, something like you might see in a movie set back in old England. Or Narnia, which...why?

But the really weird thing, that wasn’t on his body so much as in his hands-

**GROAAAA!**

“Missed me!”

-was the gigantic, spike covered _mace_ he was swinging again and again, the blows hitting the dragon’s hide without any visible damage.

Apart from making it really, really angry.

The man dodged a swipe of the dragon’s claws, leaping back again.

But something was wrong this time.

He wasn’t smiling anymore, and he didn’t go back as far as he had earlier.

My eyes trailed down, noticing something I hadn’t earlier.

_His leg._

Remember what had happened when I first saw him? How the dragon-gator thing had grabbed his leg to drag him through the open manhole?

Well, it looks like those claws had done a bit more than hold him in place.

I couldn’t see how bad the damage was; even with the torches and dragon fire, it was dark down there, and his pants being the color they were made seeing blood kind of difficult, but there was definitely a wet patch on his leg, a few inches above his knee, and I could see the rips in the cloth when he moved.

The man snarled, face twisted in pain as he jumped forward, mace smashing directly into the creature’s front teeth.

For all of our sakes, I won’t even try to describe the sound _that_ made. The dragon’s head snapped back as it screeched in pain and the man stopped moving, readying his weapon for a strike to the beast’s exposed neck.

It was a good plan in theory, but he forgot something kind of important.

The tail.

The dragon hadn’t just been knocked back, it had been bracing its muscles and spinning around, a tail longer and wider than my body rushing through the air with deadly speed.

The man saw it too late, and the blow hit him across the chest with a sickening _thud_ , enough power behind it to send a fully grown human male airborne.

I watched the man falling back into the middle of the chamber, almost arching through the air in slow motion before accelerating in those last few feet.

The only plus side was that his head didn’t make contact with the stone floor, but his right elbow sure did.

The echoing growl drowned out the worst of the sound, but I knew he wouldn’t be using that arm anytime soon.

The dragon could see it, too. I don’t know how smart monsters like that are, but predators of all types know when they have their prey right where they want them. The man had a shredded leg and probably something broken in his arm. He might still be able to move a little, but the fight was over.

The dragon’s jaws opened just a little as it released something almost like a purr.

Lunch was served.

It moved forward again.

And, this time, so did I.

Because that man, the weird, dragon-fighting, knockoff LOTR cosplay-wearing guy had told me to run and I hadn’t listened in time, and then he saved my life by attacking the creature when it had tried to eat me. He’d gotten hurt protecting a random kid who’d showed up at the worst possible time.

And, terrified or not, I was _not_ about to watch him getting flambé by the trash dragon.

The mace gleamed bright in the distance, but it was too far away. I wouldn’t be able to get over there in time, not without getting caught, but there had to be something I could use...

My foot hit something and I looked down.

It...well, it _might_ have been part of a pipe once upon a time. Now it was about two feet long, coated in rust and slime, and sort of twisted back as though something big had slashed through it.

In that moment, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I bent over. _Slowly._ My hand closed around the pipe. I kept my grip tight to avoid it sliding out of my shaking fingers.

One shot. Fail and we’re both dead.

No pressure.

Back in the center of the chamber, ponytail man had made in back to his feet, right arm dangling limp at his side. He had to be in a ridiculous amount of pain, if not from the arm or leg than from the hit to his chest that should have by all logic shattered his ribs like an eggshell but somehow _hadn’t_ , but he wasn’t shaking or screaming.

He stood there, hunched over but proud.

The dragon reared up, wings extending as it roared in triumph.

We lunged forward at the same time.

With all of my strength, I pushed the man to the side, sending out a silent apology as he hissed at the unexpected pain.

With my other hand, I swung the pipe.

The rough, slashed edge scraped uselessly along the side of its face before slashing over one of those eery yellow eyes.

**GRRRR-RRRROAAAA!**

The dragon flinched back, jaws clenching in shock, and that was when I did what had to be up until that point the _dumbest_ thing I had ever done, INCLUDING going down into the sewer in the first place.

I dropped the pipe, leaned forward _over_ that horrific mouth enough that my feet weren’t even touching the ground anymore, and _punched the flaming trash monster right in its undamaged eye._

And that’s when my day really took a turn for the crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know what you think!


End file.
